Research Funding Starts to Flow Back to Columbia, Brown

Days after reaching deals with the Trump administration, Columbia and Brown Universities say the government has already initiated the process of restoring hundreds of millions in federal research dollars it terminated earlier this year in retaliation for their alleged failures to address antisemitism on campus. 

Many of those grants came from the National Institutes of Health, which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, and funded medical research, including time-sensitive clinical trials.  

“The agreement finalized this week restored all National Institutes of Health grants to Brown researchers that had been terminated,” Brian Clark, a Brown spokesperson, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed Thursday evening. “We started to see that formalized in award letters today and expect in the coming days and weeks to see this across all of these grants.” 

In April, the administration blocked $510 million in federal grants and contracts for Brown. But under the terms of the agreement the government and university finalized Wednesday, Clark said, “Any payments should resume within 30 days,” which applies to both “the restoration of specific grants that had been terminated, and also to active (non-terminated) grants for which Brown had not been reimbursed.”

The Brown deal came about a week after Columbia agreed to pay the government $221 million in addition to changing its admissions policies, disciplinary processes and academic programs in order to restore about $400 million in federal funding the administration canceled in March.

According to Columbia’s website, “Funding and reimbursement payments have already begun to flow.”

“One week later, more than half of the terminated grants have been restored, and we expect the others to be reinstated promptly,” the website says. “Renewals and continuations that were frozen are also coming in on non-terminated grants.”

The university wrote that it’s “reviewing all grants that were terminated or suspended over the last months to identify those that were specifically directed at Columbia” and expects “the fair treatment of Columbia grants and ability to compete to be honored by all federal agencies.”

The university noted that the agreement only applies to HHS and NIH grants that the administration canceled as part of its targeted pressure campaign on Columbia. 

Faculty who asked to remain anonymous told Inside Higher Ed that either the university or NIH has told them that some grants are being reinstated or renewed. But it was unclear to them whether actual dollars have resumed flowing, and how many.

Since Trump took office in January, numerous federal agencies, including the NIH, the National Science Foundation and Education Department, have terminated thousands of other research grants at institutions across the country that don’t align with their ideological priorities. In particular, many grants that focused on transgender health, vaccine hesitancy, climate change and racial disparities have been canceled. 

Columbia researchers whose grants were terminated as part of that sweep should not expect to see their funding restored as part of this deal, the university wrote on its website. 

“Some of these grants were terminated or suspended across the board for all institutions, and have nothing specific to do with Columbia,” the webpage said. “To the extent that the federal government has made the decision not to fund certain types of projects at any institution, those grants will not be coming back to Columbia.”

Columbia and Brown are just two of numerous Ivy League Institutions that the Trump administration has targeted by threatening federal funding. 

The administration was also holding up $175 million at the University of Pennsylvania in retaliation for the university allowing a transgender athlete to compete on its swim team. Last month, the university reached a deal with the government, which has said it will restore the funding. 

The administration is also blocking $2.2 billion at Harvard University,  $202 million at Princeton University and $1 billion at Cornell University. However, those institutions have yet to reach agreements with the government that could result in restoration of their federal funding.

So far, the administration has frozen more than $6 billion across nine universities, including Brown, Columbia and Penn. Most of the funding freezes started in March, but in the last week, the administration resumed blocking funds at institutions under investigation. First, it put about $108 million on hold at Duke University, and then officials suspended an $339 million worth of grants at the University of California, Los Angeles.